qqwref
Legend
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2007
- Messages
- 7,834
- Location
- a <script> tag near you
- WCA ID
- 2006GOTT01
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It's not a bias, it's a proposed standard. My goal is to make names look reasonably similar. If we can do it in American schools, phone books, employee listings, and so on, why not in the WCA? It's not like America doesn't have people from every major world culture.
Rule of thumb: If in an English culture you could call someone "Mr. <X>" then their family name could be <X>. So bin Laden, Einarsson, de Vries, etc. are all possible. Indonesian names with one name cannot fit the standard so we just get as close as possible (by doing exactly what we do now, in this case). As for the Malaysian names, that's exactly what I mean - those names are confusing so we should write Amos Tay OR Swee Hui Tay, etc. There are two different types of given names in there - choose your favorite and put the full thing in the profile.
Why would she be Thu Thi? When in my posts have I said that given and family names must be a single "word"? Why would you think I would want that? As long as the given and family name are in that order, without stuff that isn't either of them, and written in a Latin-based script, it fits the standard completely.
This goes out to everyone in the topic: I have specifically used the terms "family name" and "given name" because I understand "first name" and "last name" ARE Western-name-biased terms. I thought I made it pretty obvious that I don't require the "family name" to be the single last "word", or the "given name" to be the single first word. Pointing out all these exceptions only makes it clear that certain people are trying really hard to make my suggestion seem unreasonable. However, from what I've seen everywhere but the WCA, it's quite reasonable and in fact reflects how the global English-language community tends to track names. Look at the Olympics. Their athletes represent a huge number of countries, but they get along fine describing everyone using the family-given standard and with no non-Latin scripts in parentheses. Here are some multicultural examples from http://www.london2012.com/athletes/:
- Michael PHELPS. Typical boring ol' American name.
- Maher ABU RMILAH. Arabic-type name from Palestine. Easy. The abu is part of the last name.
- Anqi BAI. Chinese name, in Latin script, with the given name first.
- Gabor CSASZAR. Hungarian name. They write the family name first, but the Olympics doesn't - for consistency.
- Chatuphum CHINNAWONG. Thai name. No Thai script is necessary.
- TRIYANINGSIH. Indonesian single name. No problems there.
- Sytske DE GROOT. Dutch name with a tussenvoegel. Just as easy as the Arabic name above.
- Thi Viet Anh DUONG. Vietnamese name with multiple "word" given name. Works fine.
My proposal is practically identical to what they do, just without the capital letters (and with accented letters, because why not). It's less confusing than what we have now, less cluttered, and equally useful. And, with my idea of displaying the full and native names in someone's profile, nothing is lost. If you really care about how to pronounce Yuxuan's name, you can either tell the site to display Chinese names, or you can simply bring up his profile and see the Chinese name for yourself in a fraction of a second.
Oh yeah, and for everyone complaining about how 3 names is so much, here's a mockup of how I imagine the profile might look. Compared to the huge tables of cubing information, this is very easy to understand.
